Corruption has a huge impact on economic growth, democracy, and inequality. Its consequences at the human level are incalculable. Public procurement, where public resources are used to purchase goods or services from the private sector, are particularly susceptible to corrupt practices. However, a government turnover may bring significant changes in the way public contracting is done, and thus, in the levels and types of corruption involved in public procurement. In this respect, M\'exico lived a historical government transition in 2018, with the new government promising a crackdown on corruption. In this work, we analyze data from more than 1.5 million contracts corresponding from 2013 to 2020, to study to what extent this change of government affected the characteristics of public contracting, and we try to determine whether these changes affect how corruption takes place. To do this, we propose a statistical framework to compare the characteristics of the contracting practices within each administration, separating the contracts in different classes depending on whether or not they were made with companies that have now been identified as being involved in corrupt practices. We find that while the amount of resources spent with companies that turned out to be corrupt has decreased substantially, many of the patterns followed to contract these companies were maintained, and some of those in which changes did occur, are suggestive of a larger risk of corruption.
翻译:腐败对经济增长、民主和不平等有着巨大的影响。腐败对经济增长、民主和不平等具有巨大的影响。腐败在人类层面的后果是无法估量的。公共采购(公共资源被用于从私营部门购买货物或服务)特别容易发生腐败做法。但政府更替可能会给公共订约方式带来重大变化,从而在公共采购所涉及的腐败程度和类型方面带来重大变化。在这方面,M\'exico在2018年经历了历史性的政府转型,新政府承诺打击腐败。在这项工作中,我们分析了2013年至2020年150多万份合同的数据,以研究政府这一变化在多大程度上影响了公共订约的特征,我们试图确定这些变化是否影响腐败的发生。为此,我们提出了一个统计框架,以比较每个行政部门的合同做法的特点,根据是否与现已被确定参与腐败做法的公司签订了不同类别的合同。我们发现,尽管与被确定为腐败的公司花费的资源数额大幅下降,但许多遵循了合同模式的这些公司仍面临更大的腐败风险。